We didn't start the fire.

I
continue to be overwhelmed by the positive feedback and enthusiasm from the
support I have gotten from Kickstarter. The groundswell of people cheering
us on and the evangelism - people spreading the word - is unlike anything I
have experienced. In
fact, I would say the last week was the high water mark of my career.

We
are closing in on the funding for 1.5 million which will allow us to add
both a Mac and Linux version of Wasteland 2 to the release. One of the (more
common) questions I am asked is
whether we'll support console and I believe it to be unlikely. It is imperative
that we deliver the core PC experience that the fans are expecting here and I want
to avoid any elements that could distract us. The console interface is quite
different when you consider the input device and proximity to the screen
whereas the Mac and Linux are pretty much identical to that of the
"PC". We will consider a tablet version due to the similarity
of the screen and interface but even on that we need to do a bit more research.

There
have been some nice human moments along the way that I thought I would share.

We
started off strong in the first 24 hours raising nearly 50% of our minimum need
but still I was nervous. All the signs of success were there but we all wanted
it to happen so badly that it seemed to good to be true. Around 6:00 that first
night we received an email from a wealthy software industry individual who is a
passionate fan of Wasteland and offered to help fund the game if Kickstarter
came short! Talk about feeling good. Of course I thanked him and said I hoped
we would not need his assistance but he made my whole day/week/month/year.

On
the next day I get a short tweet from an individual that confesses he
pirated Wasteland as a kid and was donating to help make up for it. I of course
forgave not knowing he had donated $10,000 dollars. An incredible gesture...
now if we could get every pirate of Wasteland 1 to donate we could really beat the Kickstarter
all time record.

Mason
Douglass who plays the kid publisher in the Kickstarter video has
gotten rave reviews for his performance. His delivery was great and I have had
people wanting to contact his manager for parts in TV/film. I jokingly told him
when we shot the bit that he might become famous from this. Perhaps he will.

And
just today I got an email along with a donation from a kid who lived down the
street from me when he was a teenager. His note was as follows:

"This
message is intended for Brian Fargo. Brian, I was your next door neighbor when
you used to live in Laguna. I was a pesky 15 or 16 year old kid that would come
around and ask you about games. You would sit down and take time to talk to me
about games, and the industry, and I just wanted you to know how cool it was that
you didn't blow me off. It meant a lot to me. Recently, I found out about your Kickstarter movement for Wasteland 2, and I contributed to it because I believe
in you and your ability to resurrect the glory of the franchise. I wish you the
best of luck in your endeavors, and thank you again for creating some memorable
memories for me during my teenage years. Take care!"

It shows that
being nice creates goodwill 20 years later.

And speaking of goodwill it occurs to me that we can harness
the power of Kickstarter in a more meaningful way. Fan funding is bigger than
me or Wasteland 2 as I have remarked before. The development community
has come together to support us in ways that I didn't think possible and our power
as developers will ultimately come from us sticking
together. Both gamers and developers have so much more strength
than they realize. But in order to help facilitate the power of crowd funding I
am going to suggest that all of us that do utilize this form of financing agree
to kickback 5% of
our profits made from such projects to other Kickstarter developers. I
am not suggesting taking a backers money and moving it to another project.. I
mean once a game has shipped and created profit that we funnel that back into
the community of developers to fund their dreams. I am
tentatively calling this "Kick It Forward" and I will be the first to
agree to it. In fact, I will have our artists create a badge that goes on
all Kickstarter projects that agree to support this initiative. Imagine the
potential if another Minecraft comes along via Kickstarter and produces
millions of dollars of investment into other developers. This economic
payback will continue to grow the movement way beyond the current system. I hope others will join me with this idea and make this a
true shakeup.

Mod kit / Map kit are great to extend the longevity of a game, I would really like to see these. For the social part I certainly wait on for an elaboration of this proposition because social certainly does not equate to Crapbook or similar stuff alone as even simple achievements that can be seen by others as well are already a small, but social feature

Why not ask Kickstarter to develop this condition as part of its standard agreements to either allow projects to opt in/out of the idea. Kickstarter can enforce it by developing something that requires projects to choose a project to honour their pledge and promote where the pledge went.

I would have called the project "Kickback", but I guess that has some unfortunate connotations when it comes to talking about funding for projects, hahaha. By the way, congratulations on hitting the $1.5 million milestone on Wasteland 2! The Mac & Linux dudes will be over the moon!

I think what you guys are doing is pretty incredible. The 5% kickback means a LOT to me. I worked for Trendy Entertainment all of last year and can tell you that passion has NOT left the industry. Working for a small company trying to get the first game out the door is a process that is fueled only by passion. Barely able to pay my own bills i continued pushing forward working the 70-80 hour weeks up to and past release. While I am no longer affiliated with Trendy is still have mad respect and love for those guys. My point is that movements such as yours show that things don't have to be how they are now. Developers can put all their attention into the project with no fear of the publisher. Your passion is not only fueling the process, but it will likely pay off. You are also immediately creating a fan base that will not turn their back on you. You don't have to 'spin' information to your community because of Publisher contract or NDA's with larger companies. This kind of development can not only be the future for gaming, but for literature, music, film, and almost any other ingenuity. I just hope it can retain the basis of passion that it now holds.

"Through the support of our amazing fan community we will be localizing the game into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Polish. For anyone in those territories that want to help with this, please look for information on our Forums."

Is it possible that this game have multiple langage ? i'm already a backer and can understand english quite good enough. But its always fun to have your basic langage too ( and might reach more people)

It's actually not that hard to open a US bank account as a foreigner.
Besides, online payment methods are improving constantly. Even if Amazon does not support non-US accounts anytime soon (and why not -there is demand and Amazon operations are multinational), I'd expect Google Wallet to extend its services to facilitate pledges within the year (so there's competition to motivate Amazon, too).

I'd like to concur with Guenter. This is an amazing idea and could really help keep the wind in the sails of this kind of awesome crowd-funded stuff. But It's disappointing Kickstarter is for US applicants only, myself and others in the U/Europe I know have looked into our local crowdfunding alternatives and found they are not remotely comparable.

However that pans out though, you sir are amazing for agreeing to do this and I'm sure many great games that otherwise wouldn't get made will see production thanks to you.

Yes, redirecting resources is a noble gesture, and we'll see if the resources will enable a fund or a grant or a foundation. However, your guidance and your support would mean even more than the resources you can contribute. You can return to your publisher's days (Interplay's publications, including those that were not internally developed, included amazing works) and throw your weight for promising people and projects. Your name holds immense value. Crowd funding as a system is in its infant stage now, next year, after these projects succeed and yield returns, you will be able to gather resources an order of magnitude greater than this. Moreover, your word would add huge credibility to the projects you judge valuable, increasing their ability to gather funds, again, by an order of magnitude.

I would definitely like to see an Android version, and unlike most, I am not obsessed with seeing all the resources go into making the game 'bigger'. Fallout 2 was bigger, but Fallout was cohesive and consistent, and could maintain the suspension of disbelief. It was not the case for Fallout 2 in my experience. I would like a believable, immersive environment with thematic consistency. But at the end of the day, I trust the judgement of this team; they know what to do far better than anyone else.

As for the idea of open sourcing the project, my two cents says: Definitely. The pedant in me says the license's got to be LGPL as opposed to GPL, but that's a mere technicality. Crowd funding and open sourcing are two sides of the same coin: Freedom. You have nothing to lose at this point by open sourcing the engine, and everything to gain. Not merely for this project, but for its social, economic and political aftereffects.

Most people who contribute to this project do so because they believe in an ideal. And you would have a hard time to find more devoted idealists than those in the free software (I think it's a defect of the language that we need to add 'as in free speech' here) community. As soon as you open source the project people would get involved; competent, driven people, and their contributions as developers would far exceed the dollars they could spare. More important perhaps, is the fact that you would get in close contact with capable, enthusiastic people that may well drive future projects you are thinking of supporting.

Please consider it. That gesture, more than anything else, would give the message of 'developers sticking together'.

Great Idea, but please take into consideration that Kickstarter is only available for indie developers wich are located in the us. There are also very good indie developers in the rest of the world, which didnt get a chance of partizipating on kickstarter. So when you trully start a project like you mentioned with support for other developers, please dont limit it to one crowdfundingpage which only operates in one country of the world, make it available for the whole globe.

Ben Woolf, the original DOS version of Wasteland is floating around on the internet and shouldn't be hard to find, but I do like the idea of say, a $5 pledge that gives you Wasteland 1 for DOS (and a link to a DOSbox guide for it).
Also, ~20.000 until Linux + Mac support! :D

I have to confess I'd never heard of Wasteland before backing this project. I do however confess to spending hours playing Elite on my BBC Micro, backing the project was a no-brainer. I recently relived those "Elite" years through an open source version of the game. A quick question.... Is there a windows/dos version of the original Wasteland for us uninitiated few? Not wanting to distract from the bigger project, but it would be great if you could release the original to backers?

I decided to up my pledge amount and became the first person to dive into the $2500 mark. I was kind of nervous about it at first, since it means I won't have the money to support other projects for a few months. This post - especially the Kick it Forward idea - tells me I made the right call in the end, and that I can be proud to have supported this project. Here's hoping WL2 is as awesome as the first one was/is!

Loved your post Brian. I agree with you 100% about your kick it forward idea. I have found so many wonderful indie games recently and love joining these kickstarter campaigns!

I have another idea. How about you share with you backers other indie games in progress or kickstarter projects you love the idea of? For example, two unreleased games (neither kickstarters, yet) that I am hugely excited about are "Lone Survivor" by Superflatgames, and "Under the ocean" by the guy who made under the garden.

Awesome update and fantastic idea in "Kick it Forward". If only the industry had started this 20 years ago, I think things would be amazing at this point. This project and of course Tim Schafer's give me hope that creative, intelligent designers working together with passionate fans can turn the industry into something new and wonderful. Thank you for never throwing in the towel, and being the creative force you always have been.
The only suggestion I would put forward is making the final product community moddable, much like Bethesda has done with their games. It is through the community and the ability to add to the games that has garnered them so much fan support.
Additionally, DDP, great suggestion. Perhaps that comes after the initial release is successful...?

I really do look forward to this project getting up and running! I loved the first Wasteland so much, and I can only imagine what you can do given the technology that is available now.
If you need any help testing, please feel free to contact me, I would be proud to be able to help if the project needs it. Either way, I wish you the absolute best.

Personally I think console and tablet support should be separately funded kickstarter projects. That way those that want such support can have it, if they are filling to fund it. The money raised as part of this project should go towards making the desktop version more awesome.

@Jim Chaney: From the project home page: "At $1.5 million, the world gets even bigger. You’ll have more adventures to play, more challenges to deal with, and a greater level of complexity to the entire storyline. We’ll add more environments, story elements, and characters to make the rich world come alive even more. We will even be able to bring Wasteland 2 to OS X and Linux! And after $1.5 million the sky is the limit." So platform support isn't the only upgrade at $1.5 million.

One point re: stretch goals and platform support... I don't know how to phrase it other than 'Why?'. Early pledges would have been for the original product on PC, and since I don't have a Mac (or Linux install disk ;) new platforms are not appealing. Even though I have console(s), as you say, this is not a couch experience like that. However, *more content* is very appealing.
I understand that with 26 days to go, more subscribers is good, but I don't think I am being too parochial to say that, for most backers, making that game deep would be better effort than adding more platforms (spreading it thin, to stretch the metaphor too far).